The River of the Dead

Summary

The river of the dead is the water the dead person crosses to reach his last home. Among many peoples a man dies and finds before him a river, a lake or a canal, with a ferry steered by a boatman or a bridge kept by a guard, and only those who pay something cross: a coin, a cow, their clothes, their name or their deeds.

The oldest complete story that sets the river and the ferryman on the road to the netherworld is the Sumerian Enlil and Ninlil. Enlil takes the girl Ninlil on the bank of the river, and she conceives the moon, Suen; the fifty great gods and the seven who decide destinies declare him ritually impure, and he leaves the city, with Ninlil following. Three times he stands in her path, once as the city gatekeeper, once as "the man of the Id-kura, the river of the underworld, the man-eating river", and once as "the man of the ferryboat", and tells each of them not to say where he has gone. She asks each one about him; he answers in disguise and lies with her, and each time she conceives a son who goes down to the netherworld in place of his master's son, who rises to the sky: Nergal, then Ninazu, then Enbilulu, the inspector of canals.

The picture recurs among the peoples. In the epic of Gilgamesh the boatman Urshanabi crosses the Waters of Death to Utnapishtim; in Egypt the dead call on the boatman "He who looks behind" to bring the ferry; among the Greeks Charon takes his fare and ferries the dead; among the Etruscans Charun stands with his hammer at the door of the dead; in India the righteous cross the river Vaitaraṇī and the wicked sink in it; in Japan two demons at the river of the three ways strip the dead of their clothes; in the North the rider to the house of Hel crosses the river Gjöll on a bridge roofed with gold; and in Persia the soul crosses the Chinvat Bridge. Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet X; Odyssey 10.508–515; Garuḍa Purāṇa 2.15–20; Gylfaginning 49.

The idea these stories turn on is that death is a crossing and that the crossing has a price. Water parts the living from the dead as a river parts one land from another; it can only be crossed by ferry or bridge, and whoever owns the ferry or guards the bridge decides who crosses. The price differs, and shows what each people values: the Greeks bury their dead and put the coin with them, so the unburied cannot cross; the Indians give the Brahmins a cow; the Zoroastrians cross by their deeds; the Egyptian crosses by knowing names; and the Persian soul that was mourned too much crosses with difficulty, because its family's tears have become a river.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. The word that gathers this subject is ʿabara. The Akkadian dictionary gives ebēru as to cross a river, a sea or the sky, nēberu as a crossing, a ford and a ferry-boat, and ša nēberi as the ferryman. BDB gives Hebrew ʿābar as to pass over. In Lane, ʿabara al-nahr is to cross a river from one side to the other; ʿabara said of a man is that he died, "as though he crossed over the bridge of the present life"; miʿbar is a thing by which one crosses a river, a ferry-boat or a bridge; and ʿabra is a tear. One root holds the river, the ferry, death and tears, which is what this subject brings together.

Linguistic Root

Crossing and the tear

The Akkadian dictionary derives nēberu from ebēru and gives it three senses: a crossing or ford, a ferry-boat, and the name of a planet. So the Akkadians called a star "a crossing" as they called the ferry. BDB gives Hebrew ʿābar as to pass over, pass through. Lane gives three things that belong to this subject: ʿabara in the sense "he died"; ʿābir sabīl, the traveller who passes through without staying; and ʿabra, a tear, or a tear before it overflows, or grief without weeping. Arabic ʿayn is ʿayin in Hebrew and drops in Akkadian, so that the verb begins with a vowel, as the Juthoor table says.

Hubur

The Akkadian dictionary gives Hubur as the river of the netherworld in late Babylonian literature, and the same name as a month in Old Assyrian and the name of a plant. We read it on the method as khabār: Akkadian ḫ is Arabic kh, b is b and r is r. In Lane, khabār is soft land with burrows and hollows, or crumbling ground in which the feet of beasts sink, and the proverb says "he who avoids the khabār is safe from stumbling". On this reading Hubur is the ground in which the foot sinks and does not come back, which is what the river of the netherworld does to whoever goes down into it. It is a reading proposed on the method, since khabār in Arabic is soft ground, not a river.

The other rivers' names

The Sanskrit name Vaitaraṇī comes from vi-taraṇa, crossing over, and Monier-Williams gives vitaraṇa as both crossing and granting, gift; the Garuḍa Purāṇa says outright that the river is so named because it is crossed by a gift. So the Sanskrit name holds the crossing and its price, as the Arabic verb holds the crossing and death. The project's Greek rereading essay glosses Styx as "hatred" and Acheron as "grief". In Japan the river's name is written 三途, sanzu, "the three ways", and the Sino-Japanese scripture names three ways of crossing. Gjöll and its bridge Gjallarbrú share the letters of the verb gjalla, which Cleasby-Vigfusson gives as to yell and scream, said also of a bull bellowing and a bowstring twanging, and in Gylfaginning the bridge thunders under the living rider alone as it did under five troops of the dead.

Attestations by Culture

Mesopotamia: the Waters of Death and the boatman who is banished

In the tenth tablet of the epic Gilgamesh smashes the "Stone Ones" with which Urshanabi used to make the crossing, so he cuts three hundred punting poles in their place to drive the boat without letting his hand touch the Waters of Death, and when the poles run out he strips off his garment and holds it up as a sail. Then the boatman pays for this crossing: after Gilgamesh fails the test of sleep, Utnapishtim banishes him from the quay and he goes back with him to Uruk. The Urshanabi page tells the story.

Egypt: the boatman who looks behind

In the Pyramid Texts Ra assigns King Pepi to the boatman "He who looks behind", ferryman of a canal the dictionary renders as "the Knife Canal", to bring him the ferry in which he takes the gods across to the eastern side of the sky. Another text says the king's fare was not taken on the great ferry. In the Book of the Dead the deceased cries: "He who looks behind, wake Aqen for me!", the keeper of the boat; then the parts of the ferry ask him their names, and he answers each part by its name, among them: "you were made from the hide of the Mnevis bull and the sinews of Seth". In the tale of the Eloquent Peasant the peasant reproaches the judge as "a ferryman who ferries only one who has the fare".

Greece and Rome: the fare and the burial

The Odyssey describes the underworld by its rivers: into Acheron flow Periphlegethon and Cocytus, a branch of the water of the Styx. Hesiod says Styx is a daughter of Ocean and her water is the great oath of the gods: any immortal who swears falsely by it lies breathless for a full year, tasting neither ambrosia nor nectar, and is then cut off from the gods' councils for nine years. The oldest mention of Charon is in the poem Minyas, quoted by Pausanias: "the boat on which embark the dead, that the old ferryman, Charon, used to steer". In Aristophanes' Frogs Heracles tells Dionysus: you will come to a bottomless lake, and an aged mariner will take you over in a little boat, and take two obols for your fare. Virgil says Charon ferries only the buried; the unburied wander the shore for a hundred years before they are let across.

India: the Vaitaraṇī and the cow

The Garuḍa Purāṇa sets the river Vaitaraṇī in the middle of the road of Yama: a hundred yojanas wide, a flow of pus and blood with heaps of bones on its banks, full of crocodiles, seething when it sees the sinner. Fishermen come with a boat and say: if you have made the gift of a cow, the boat will come to you; otherwise not. Whoever made no gift sinks, and the messengers fix a skewer through his lips and carry him across like a fish on a hook. So the book tells a man to give before he dies a black or reddish cow with gilded horns, carrying a golden image of Yama, saying "Salutations to Vaitaraṇī", and then the river does not appear to him on the great road.

China and Japan: the tree that weighs the clothes

In the Sino-Japanese Scripture of the Ten Kings and the Causes of Kṣitigarbha's Resolve, on the fourteenth day the dead reach the palace of the second king by the river of "burying heads", whose ford is called the Nai ford, and there are three ways of crossing: shallow mountain rapids, a deep abyss and a bridge. Guards with the heads of oxen and horses drive the dead, and the first man a woman knew carries her across on his back. On the bank stands a tree called "the garment-collar tree", under which live two demons: an old woman who strips off the clothes and an old man who hangs them on the branches, and the branch bends according to the weight of the sin. The text says the family put with the dead a staff three feet long bearing the image of Kṣitigarbha and a pair of shoes for the mountain road. The JAANUS dictionary of Japanese art terms says this scripture was composed in Japan, somewhat later than a tenth-century Chinese scripture of the Ten Kings.

The North: the bridge that rings

Gylfaginning says that the rivers flow from the spring Hvergelmir in Niflheim, and that Gjöll is nearest to the gate of Hel. When Hermóðr rides to Hel to seek his brother Baldr, he rides nine nights through dark, deep valleys until he reaches the river Gjöll and rides onto the bridge Gjallarbrú, roofed with shining gold; the maiden Móðguðr who guards it asks his name and kin and says: five troops of dead men rode over the bridge yesterday, and it rings no less under you alone, and you have not the colour of dead men.

Persia: the bridge and the river of tears

The bridge leads the righteous soul to paradise and narrows for the wicked, as told under the Chinvat Bridge. In the Book of Arda Viraf the priest, on his journey to the other world, sees a great, gloomy river with many souls on it; some cannot cross, some cross with great difficulty and some cross easily. He is told: this river is the tears that people shed unlawfully for their departed, and those who cannot cross are those for whom much lamentation was made after their death.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Who crosses and who pays. The Greek boatman takes two obols and ferries the buried; the Indian boatman ferries whoever gave a cow; the Egyptian boatman takes the king without a fare and the dead man if he knows the names of the boat; the Norse guardian asks the rider his name and kin; the Persian bridge widens or narrows by deeds; the Japanese tree weighs the clothes. In Mesopotamia the living man who crosses the Waters of Death pays no fare but cuts three hundred poles with his own hands, and it is the boatman who pays, with banishment. In Persia the dead cross by the tears of others, and the more a family weeps, the harder the crossing.

In most of these stories someone stands at the river to judge the one who crosses. The crossing leads to the judgment of the dead: after the second king's river in the Japanese scripture comes a king's palace with scales to weigh sins; at the Chinvat Bridge Rashnu weighs deeds; in Egypt the heart is weighed before Osiris. And the river is the boundary that the living cross when they go down to the netherworld, as in the descent to the underworld: Gilgamesh crosses alive, the bridge thunders under Hermóðr, and Dionysus in the Frogs haggles with Charon over the fare.

The water in these stories carries something of the first water, as in the primordial waters: in Egypt the river of the sky is crossed toward the east, and the Waters of Death in Gilgamesh part mankind from the survivor of the flood. In Arabic crossing and interpreting are one root, so this subject meets oracles and divination: ʿabara al-ruʾyā, he interpreted the dream. And in Egypt the parts of the ferry are made from the hide of the Mnevis bull, as in the sacred bull.

Symbolic Reading

The project's Greek rereading essay reads the underworld as encoded knowledge of the earth: the Styx that parts the living from the dead is the water table, and the dead "cross" it because bodies are buried below it; Charon is the burial rite, and the coin in the dead person's mouth a real burial custom attested by archaeology. It reads the five rivers of the underworld: Styx the stagnant groundwater, Acheron the slow rivers of the marshes, Phlegethon the lava beneath the earth, Cocytus the sound of water in caves, and Lethe the decay in which the dead is forgotten. The Persian essay reads the Chinvat Bridge as a forerunner of the ṣirāṭ, the bridge that widens for the believer and narrows for the unbeliever.